One Possible Theory on the Clinton and Bush-41 Friendship

Are Bill and George Sr. trying to engineer a quiet coup against Chimpie, who they realize is delusional, falling apart emotionally, and putting the nation in even graver danger than most realize?

That theory makes a lot of sense, not that logic makes it true, but if there's any decency and genuine concern for the republic in either of these dudes, perhaps that is exactly what is happening.

Ideas?

I'm Shocked, Shocked, I Tell You!!! Oil Company Execs Lied?

Remember the Cheney secret energy task force in 2001? Remember how Dickie fought tooth and nail to deny access to the documents of its meetings? Well, gee, it seems like all of us conspiracy nutwads were right after all about the composition of the task force and the fact that they had shit that they knew damn well to cover up.

A White House document shows that executives from big oil companies met with Vice President Cheney's energy task force in 2001 -- something long suspected by environmentalists but denied as recently as last week by industry officials testifying before Congress.

The document, obtained this week by The Washington Post, shows that officials from Exxon Mobil Corp., Conoco (before its merger with Phillips), Shell Oil Co. and BP America Inc. met in the White House complex with the Cheney aides who were developing a national energy policy, parts of which became law and parts of which are still being debated.

Now even though oil lobby butt-boy Sen. Ted Stevens of Alaska made sure these liars weren't sworn in when they testified before Congress, there still may be a wet-ass hour for some oil big shots when they learn something about the law.

The executives were not under oath when they testified, so they are not vulnerable to charges of perjury; committee Democrats had protested the decision by Commerce Chairman Ted Stevens (R-Alaska) not to swear in the executives. But a person can be fined or imprisoned for up to five years for making "any materially false, fictitious or fraudulent statement or representation" to Congress.

You see, the evidence is none other than Secret Service records, probably as close to an unimpeachable source as you could want, and it contrasts significantly with the testimony of five oil bigwigs.

Toward the end of the hearing, [New Jersey Senator Frank] Lautenberg asked the five executives: "Did your company or any representatives of your companies participate in Vice President Cheney's energy task force in 2001?" When there was no response, Lautenberg added: "The meeting . . . "

"No," said Raymond.

"No," said Chevron Chairman David J. O'Reilly.

"We did not, no," Mulva said.

"To be honest, I don't know," said BP America chief executive Ross Pillari, who came to the job in August 2001. "I wasn't here then."

"But your company was here," Lautenberg replied.

"Yes," Pillari said.

Shell Oil president John Hofmeister, who has held his job since earlier this year, answered last. "Not to my knowledge," he said.

Deny, lie, cover-up, then lie some more, denying the reality, finally slipping into cognitive dissonance as the lie becomes truth in self-inflicted Orwellian brainwashing. That's how your Republican-big business fascist axis spins.

Hell to Pay for Many Democrats

They may want to lay it off on Chimpie that they were duped, but the truth is that most of the Democrats who voted for authorization for use of force in Iraq back in 2002 did it because they were and are lily-livered, bottom-feeding, political opportunists who care about one thing above all else--their power. They're no different than their Republican counterparts in this one area. Although they may have a slightly different political ideology, or at least mouth slight variations on the same themes, when it's ball-cuttin' time, they don't examine their hearts, or speak their truth, or do what's right. No, what they do is what makes them morally suspect whether in or out of power--they pander. They pander to the worst and simplest and basest and most craven impulses of the people they serve in order to remain in office. And on this count, they sold us out.

The chief culprits in all this are John Kerry, John Edwards, and Hillary Clinton, because of their presidential ambitions and because they constituted the party leadership. While Howard Dean and Dennis Kucinich were crying in the wilderness from the get-go that Bush, Cheney, Wolfowitz, Rice, Hadley, et. al. were working the evidence to reach a foregone conclusion, no prominent member of the opposition party had the guts to stand up in their faces and call bullshit on everything that we now know IS bullshit, 2059 dead Americans and tens of thousands of dead Iraqis later. If Kerry or Clinton had stood up and opposed this war crime vehemently, it would not have marginalized them--it would have made them into true leaders, instead of the sorrowful hacks we've already had to suffer from for far too long.

This talk of Hillary Clinton as the inevitable candidate in 2008 makes me sick. I used to like her, because she was smarter than most of the other senators, quick on her feet, and seemed to have a collection of strong principles on which she operated. But her vote on the war resolution was so clearly calculated, so carefully weighed, that it revealed her as an even viler offender of the public trust. And as such, she doesn't deserve this vote.

Their cowardice not only enabled this war, but now is enabling Chimpie to defend his decision because, in his logic, they were as stupid (or corrupt) as he was. And to hear the Dems whine that they were fooled is pathetic. How was anyone fooled? Go look at those tapes of the case for war. Bush, Cheney, Powell, all visibly lying, or at least very, very uncomfortable in what they were saying, because, see, they didn't know at the time how easily the opposition would fold. What glee they must have had to see how easily they could cow their Democratic counterparts into playing along.

My friends and I were protesting a Bush visit in September, 2002, and then protesting against the war in San Francisco before in started in 2003 and then again in 2004, and we went to high schools to counter the recruiters, plus many other actions in print and on the streets, like a 4th of July parade in which a confrontation with Toys for Tots ex-marines revealed just how deeply this ugliness in the American character festers.

But for once, at least, my conscience is clear. Let's hope that the conscience of each of the enabling quislings in the Democratic Party still has some power to redeem them.

Spin This, Wingnuts

Oh, how Chimpie must be screaming up and down the aisle in Air Force One, pulling out hanks of hair and slamming tray-tables in front of quaking staffers. The poll just issued by USA Today is devastatingly negative, and the killer stat has got to be this:

• A 53% majority say they trust what Bush says less than they trusted previous presidents while they were in office. In a specific comparison with President Clinton, those surveyed by 48%-36% say they trust Bush less.

By twelve points, they trust Clinton--Clinton who was impeached, Clinton who lied about Monica Lewinsky's prodigious fellatio technique, Clinton who lied to Hilary, but who never lied us into war, or lied about lying us into war, or who had a chief staffer indicted for lying about outing a CIA agent--more than Chimpie! Amazing!

This is just wonderful, because even though the Republican held House and Senate will not life a finger to hold Chimpie accountable--yet--the American people are finally waking up from their long stupor of hope that people in power will be truthful if they say they are. Psych! All politicians, all leaders, must earn their credibility every fucking day, every fucking day, by being straight with those they serve.

Or else.

Quick! Give Pat an Aluminum Helmet!

What a day. I'm still on my first cup of coffee and this is my fourth posting, thanks to the wacky world we inhabit. ABC News reports that Pat Robertson is off his meds again and preaching apocalypse for rational thinkers in Pennsylvania:

Conservative Christian televangelist Pat Robertson told citizens of a Pennsylvania town that they had rejected God by voting their school board out of office for supporting "intelligent design" and warned them on Thursday not to be surprised if disaster struck...In voting on Tuesday, all eight Dover, Pennsylvania, school board members up for re-election lost their seats after trying to introduce "intelligent design" to high school science students as an alternative to the theory of evolution.

Send this guy up to MIT, for God's sake, and get him outfitted for whatever it is that is screwing up his brain waves. It sure as hell isn't God transmitting this crap.

Bad News for Alien Abductees and Mind Control Victims

Thanks to a posting in Americablog, we've learned of some new findings from a study at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

It has long been suspected that the government has been using satellites to read and control the minds of certain citizens. The use of aluminum helmets has been a common guerrilla tactic against the government's invasive tactics [1]. Surprisingly, these helmets can in fact help the government spy on citizens by amplifying certain key frequency ranges reserved for government use. In addition, none of the three helmets we analyzed provided significant attenuation to most frequency bands.

So should I switch to tin? Titanium? Disprobium? Simple lead or iron? Anyone out there know what will save me from these evil impulses?

Ali Scores Another Knockout

From the Washington Post, this is a delightful item:

Aretha Franklin was teary-eyed, Carol Burnett was teasing, Alan Greenspan was reliably taciturn, and "The Greatest of All Time" stole the show when President Bush bestowed the Medal of Freedom on them and 10 others in a White House ceremony yesterday.

Bush, who appeared almost playful, fastened the heavy medal around Muhammad Ali's neck and whispered something in the heavyweight champion's ear. Then, as if to say "bring it on," the president put up his dukes in a mock challenge. Ali, 63, who has Parkinson's disease and moves slowly, looked the president in the eye -- and, finger to head, did the "crazy" twirl for a couple of seconds.

The room of about 200, including Cabinet secretaries, tittered with laughter. Ali, who was then escorted back to his chair, made the twirl again while sitting down. And the president looked visibly taken aback, laughing nervously.

Was Ali making a political statement? In his remarks about the fighter, Bush mentioned the Olympic gold medal, the grit, "the Ali shuffle, the lightning jabs . . . the sheer guts and determination he brought to every fight." He did not mention Ali's very public opposition to the Vietnam War, which led the prizefighter to lose his boxing license for three years when he refused to serve in the Army.

Let me point out that Ali risked everything, including prison, because of his principles, and even as a veteran, I honor his choice. He was stripped of his heavyweight title because of his courageous stand against the war. Contrast that with Chimpie who evaded service in Vietnam by getting daddy Bush's help to jump over 1000 others to get into the "Champagne unit" of the Texas Air National Guard, and then didn't even fill that obligation. The writer of this piece, Jose Antonio Vargus, sums the ceremony up perfectly with this:

Ali, dressed in a suit, barely cracking a smile, received the loudest and most sustained applause of the day. And the always quotable man who said "I ain't got no quarrel with them Viet Cong" and "I am the onliest of boxing's poet laureates" delivered the most striking moment without speaking a word.

Happy Veterans Day

To all who have served, bless you, for you have done your duty in sacrifice, even when those who hold the reins of power have abused your loyalty and faithfulness. As an instrument of policy, the military must be under civilian control. Sadly, when the civilian control is corrupt, greedy, and without military experience of their own, grievous harm is done by and to our fighting men and women under arms. It is paramount that we always use force as a last resort, that we employ it wisely and only necessarily in our defense and never as an imperial power, for the private gain of corporations, or the religious idealism of theocratic extremists.

Have a good day. My wife always makes meatloaf for me on Veterans Day, with real mashed potatoes, good greens (Brussels sprouts!), and maybe even devils food cake with chocolate icing. Enjoy yourselves.

Chimpie, Karl, Dickless, Wolfowitz, DeLay, the Hillbilly Heroin Homeboy Limbaugh, Sean Hannity, and the rest of the Chickhawks--hang your heads in shame, then get down on your bony knees and thank your god that those other brave souls died in your place so you could espouse your hate-filled war whooping like little boys playing soldier. And no, Chimpie, you MAY NOT put on your flight suit. Go to your room.

More for Your Entertainment Dollar

Oh, goodness, this is wonderful news for rhetoricians and linguists everywhere. Courtesy of CNN:

White House officials are determined to reverse President Bush's poor poll showings on the topics of Iraq and "honesty and trustworthiness."

What they're going to learn is that honesty and trustworthiness are like virginity--despite "born again" Christian claims of assertion to the contrary, once you're fucked on any of these, you're not honest, trustworthy, or hymenally intact, whichever the case may be.

I'll be charitable--everyone is entitled to one mistake, even two mistakes. But when the evidence stacks up for dozens of breaches of the public trust, or if your significant other is caught in bed with someone else thirty times, or if a car salesman's statements are provably wrong ten instances in ten minutes, reestablishing credibility, fidelity, or belief is impossible. But hey, nobody accused the White House of living in a world governed by logic or common sense.

White House aides, who agreed to speak to CNN only on the condition of anonymity, said they hoped to increase what they called their "hit back" in coming days.

The officials say they plan to repeatedly make the point -- as they did during the 2004 campaign -- that pre-war intelligence was faulty, it was not manipulated and everyone was working off the same intelligence.

Yeah, that'll work--repeatedly shout what has already been discredited and no one but the dimmest fanatic of Chimpie is going to even hope to believe. How are they going to do it?

They hope to arm GOP officials with more quotes by Democrats making the same pre-war claims as Republicans did about Saddam Hussein's weapons of mass destruction.

This is actually good news for the more leftist radical among us, because it will help to tar the "moderate" Bush bootlickers in the Democratic Party with the aiding and abetting brush. Shitheads like Biden, Lieberman, and, yes, Hillary Clinton, political opportunists all who voted for war will be exposed for the traitors to the people that they indeed are. Perhaps some fresh blood with real democratic ideas, with real desire to serve the people, will at last ooze into this sclerotic political whorehouse.

But in the meantime it's going to be hysterical to watch the backpedaling, rationalizations, and pretzel logic of these assholes squirming together under the new light of American awareness.

Welcome to Your Police State

From today's Washington Post comes a chilling report on how determined this administration is to use any means necessary against ordinary citizens to consolidate power. You think you have a right to privacy, established by your Constitution and protected by those sworn to uphold it? Well, thanks to the Chimpie gang's broad reinterpretation and reimplementation of old policies and their railroading of the PATRIOT Act greased by fearmongering of willing hysterics in the mainstream media, if you have been missing life under Stalin, don't be so blue. In Connecticut, a good citizen just doing his job was approached and intimidated by FBI agents wanting him to violate privacy rights of other innocent individuals and remain quiet about it under penalty of law.

The Connecticut case affords a rare glimpse of an exponentially growing practice of domestic surveillance under the USA Patriot Act, which marked its fourth anniversary on Oct. 26. "National security letters," created in the 1970s for espionage and terrorism investigations, originated as narrow exceptions in consumer privacy law, enabling the FBI to review in secret the customer records of suspected foreign agents. The Patriot Act, and Bush administration guidelines for its use, transformed those letters by permitting clandestine scrutiny of U.S. residents and visitors who are not alleged to be terrorists or spies.

The FBI now issues more than 30,000 national security letters a year, according to government sources, a hundredfold increase over historic norms. The letters -- one of which can be used to sweep up the records of many people -- are extending the bureau's reach as never before into the telephone calls, correspondence and financial lives of ordinary Americans.

But wait, you protest. The courts require certain standards of suspicion be met, right? Oh, you are so, so very naive. Remember that this is a government run by liars, thieves, murderers, war profiteers, and totalitarians.

ssued by FBI field supervisors, national security letters do not need the imprimatur of a prosecutor, grand jury or judge. They receive no review after the fact by the Justice Department or Congress. The executive branch maintains only statistics, which are incomplete and confined to classified reports. The Bush administration defeated legislation and a lawsuit to require a public accounting, and has offered no example in which the use of a national security letter helped disrupt a terrorist plot.

Oh yes, I forgot to mention that they are also horribly incompetent--the Chimpettes have no proof that it even works!

You see, these are motherfuckers who want power. That's it. They are not concerned with security or the rule of law or the protection of the citizenry. What other conclusion can one draw from the insistence on a practice that is unproductive, anti-American, and in fact ties up valuable investigative resources that should actually be looking for dangerous people with evil designs on our nation.

Here's a tip: 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, Washington D.C. Any cabbie can take you there.

Exhibit # 13, Your Honor, on Why Cheney Is a War Criminal

From today's Washington Post comes an article explaining the internal war regarding the use of torture, and I have to ask you all, why are we even having such a debate? Isn't the issue absolutely clear? Apparently, we have Americans in leadership positions who think that any means should be available, just in case. From the WaPo article:

Cheney's camp says the United States does not torture captives, but believes the president needs nearly unfettered power to deal with terrorists to protect Americans. To preserve the president's flexibility, any measure that might impose constraints should be resisted. That is why the administration has recoiled from embracing the language of treaties such as the U.N. Convention Against Torture, which Cheney's aides find vague and open-ended.

Did you catch the incredible contradiction in Cheney's thinking? On the one hand, he finds the UN treaty against torture "vague and open-ended" while simultaneously wanting to give the president "nearly unfettered power to deal with terrorists," which is also vague and open-ended. What the fuck?

Of course, you can't expect the WaPo to point out the hypocrisy that is so obvious within a single paragraph, because I'm sure that it will be readily apparent to all those news screaming heads on MSNBC, CNN, ABC, NBC, CBS, and--of course--FOX. Since that's where America gets its debating points, I'm sure they'll be fully informed of this dark, bloody stain on our national reputation abroad.

Dick Cheney is a fascist and a criminal. My God, I hope we have our own version of the Nuremburg trials. Who wants to pull the lever that makes this crooked motherfucker's neck snap? We'll have to have a lottery for that privilege.

Is Chimpie Now "Toasty"? Is Scooter Soon to Be "Inmate # 3374871"?

Chimpie's poll numbers remind me of the tech stock bubble crash of 2000-2001. Lucent, previously the darling of the investment community, had soared from an initial IPO of $24 (or close to that) to $80 a share and I had colleagues who were shifting their entire portfolios into Lucent stock, with some even borrowing money to buy even more of Lucent on margin. Considering that these folks were also working for a Lucent-owned subsidiary, this was really not the wisest of moves, but hell--it was going to $100/share!

Then it dropped to $75, $73, $70...well, a buying opportunity, they said, a little profit-taking, that's all. They bought more. $69...$65...$61...$55. Some started dumping shares of exercising their options. $37...$29...$17...by now it was clear that there was going to be no recovery, as it was revealed that like many other high-flyers, Lucent had engaged in questionable practices to make their books look good. For example, they loaned money to customers to buy Lucent equipment, thus logging the loans as assets along with the sales which had yet to actually put any gear into the hands of customers, who then were to use it to make money to pay back the loans. Got it? Yeah, it sounded corrupt to me too.

$12...$11...and the joke became, "Hey, it can't go below zero dollars." $7...$4...we began to wonder if that was strictly true. It's been hovering between $1 and $3.25 a share ever since, and sinking last time I looked.

And so it is with the Chimpie administration. Bush is at 35 percent approval rating, when it once was at 90-something right after 9/11.

Well, at least it can't go below zero, ha ha ha. Unless you consider the finger in the dike of corruption that I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby has as one of the digits on his left hand. He's being arraigned today, expected to plead not guilty. He's facing 30 years in prison. Patrick Fitzgerald's appearance on Friday to present his case, according to Newsweek, even impressed Bush himself. If Libby flips...

It can go below zero.

How It's Breaking Down for Bush

There is a fault line running through the executive branch of our government right now. On one side is El Presidente Chimperor Chimpie Bush, our incurious and rather dimwitted chief executive. Allied with him are Karl Rove, Karen Hughes, Condoleezza Rice, and the Bush clan. On the other side of the increasingly widening divide is the Cheney cabal, consisting of Cheney, Rumsfeld, Scooter "I"m a-goin to Prison" Libby, new VP chief of staff David Addington and new assistant to the vice president for national security affair John Hannah. Now that Scooter has been indicted and Rover is still under investigation, it looks definite that somebody is going to take a fall, and if Seymour Hersh is right, it's going to get very big and very heavy.

Rove is probably right now telling Chimpie that he'd better be prepared to throw Cheney to the sharks if he wants to survive as president. Hell, that's what Nixon tried to do by letting the prosecution go forward against Spiro Agnew. Distraction is the name of the game. Trouble is, Cheney has far more power that Agnew did and Cheney is no pie-eyed idealist who thinks Chimpie is Our Saviour. In fact, he knows good and well what the Bush clan is capable of, up to and including assassination (remember CIA-chief William Casey's convenient death during Iran-Contra?), so you can bet he has kept a few trunks and suitcases secreted that contain a plan of escape should the Bushits realize that the only way to sever th umbilical cord of corruption between Chimpie and Cheney is to make him the scapegoat for all that twisting of intelligence leading to war. Then a sudden heart attack, elaborate funeral and inflated rhetoric after substantial revelations in the press, and Chimpie scrimps out his last months in the White House, broken, but not destroyed.

You see, if it is suddenly revealed that Cheney was behind the intelligence cooking and that Bush was just a gullible dupe, no one would be surprised, much as when Reagan said he couldn't remember and guns for hostages negotiations or arms for the contra forces in Nicaragua. He was the "amiable dunce" to Bush's irritatingly incurious ignoramus. Since George W. has always been protected by Mommy Barbara and Daddy Bush and their moneyed friends like Prince Bandar (among the Saudis, for example) they've got the will and the resources to really stick it to Cheney if it will pull the prosecutorial bloodhounds off the scent of a panicked Chimperor, up to and including having Cheney essentially take a bullet for team Bush.

But Cheney is a wily insider, with a lot of keys to closets in which skeletons for every major conservative pol are hidden, and he won't hesitate to call in all and any favors he can to salvage his own skin. And he knows that if the stain can be splashed on Bush, he can remain the enigma he's always wanted to be and return to Wyoming fo clip his Halliburton coupons for his remaining days.

The real battle royale will not be between Patrick Fitzgerald and the corrupt scum of the exeuctive branch, but rather betwen the White House and the Naval Observatory. Chimpie and Cheney are scheduled for a steel-caged death match.

It's gonna be great!

Making My Day

What a great day! Senator Harry Reid's move today was extremely heartening. Now add this Canadian article on New Yorker writer Seymour Hersh's view of the Scooter Libby indictment:

"He's going to save America," Hersh predicted, on the phone from his home in Washington, just days before Fitzgerald announced indictments against I. Lewis (Scooter) Libby, U.S. Vice-President Dick Cheney's chief of staff, on Friday.

"Because it's not just about Wilson," maintained Hersh, who, as a New York Times reporter in the late 1960s, first blew the lid off the My Lai massacre in Vietnam and, more recently, exposed abuses at Abu Ghraib, the prison west of Baghdad where U.S. forces engaged in torture and humiliation of prisoners. He appears in Toronto tomorrow to speak to the group Canadian Journalists for Free Expression.

"Fitzgerald's going deep. He may just unravel the whole conspiracy," continues Hersh, who might be proven right. While Libby resigned after being indicted for perjury, obstruction of justice and making false statements, Fitzgerald continues to investigate Karl Rove, President George W. Bush's influential deputy chief of staff.

Mr. Hersh is no cockeyed optimist--unlike your humble blogger who finds such accusations a badge of honor in such dire times--and for him to be this upbeat tells me that he knows something we don't and that something is very, very bad news for Chimpie and the Chimpettes.

If You Think Chimpie's Plan for Avian Flu Will Work...

...then review the record for national security in general.

The Bush administration has missed dozens of deadlines set by Congress after the Sept. 11 attacks for developing ways to protect airplanes, ships, and railways from terrorists.

A plan to defend ships and ports from attack is six months overdue. Rules to protect air cargo from infiltration by terrorists are two months late. A study on the cost of antiterrorism training for federal law enforcement officers who fly commercially was supposed to be done more than three years ago.

I guess Jesus will take care of it.

Cafferty Again, Now on Tom DeLay

"The former house leader accused of money-laundering and conspiracy--he's charged with felonies--is suddenly concerned with integrity...So let me get this straight: Republicans get Republican judges?"

Go Jack!

Jack Cafferty Speaks Like an American

On CNN, just moments ago, Jack Cafferty launched into a passionate rant in which he said (and I'm paraphrasing) that this is not a Republican or Democratic thing, but has to do with what's right and what's wrong, and if we were lied to, and most Americans now believe we were, then it has to be discussed and examined, and if it is proven, then those that lied us into war should have their fingernails pulled out and then be thrown out.

Whew! A journalist with blood flowing through his veins. Imagine!

My hat's off to you, Jack. Of course now we have to listen to Leslie Blitzer and his overfed pundits try to dampen Cafferty's clear insight. At least Jeff Greenfield, despite his conservative bent, is owning up to the lack of honesty in the Chimpie administration.

"This country is involved in a war that is not like Pearl Harbor...with a grave and gathering fret." That's what Greenfield is saying, and that a debate on the war would actually benefit this country.

The kneepad press may be recognizing that the winds have shifted.

The Tide Has Turned

For those of us who have known for three years that Chimpie's program for invasion of Iraq was a deranged and/or dishonest play for raiding the U.S. Treasury, paralyzing the citizenry by fear, and seizing all power in the name of national security, this is a sweet, sweet moment. At long last, Harry Reid and the Democrats are showing some fucking spine and forcing the Senate into closed session because, as Popeye would have put it, "I've taken all I can stands and I can't stands no more!"

They are going deep into why Scooter Libby has been indicted, why Dick Cheney has continuously lied and been allowed to get away with it, and why hundreds of billions of dollars and thousands upon thousands of lives have been destroyed for a war which is not indefensible on any level. War crimes, war profiteering, and general trafficking in human misery are crimes that deserve hanging, and now the motherfucking bastards are going to get what they deserve.

At last. At last. At long last, we may see that democracy can work in this country.

Further into the Bunker

Chimpie is retreating further into the labyrinthe, both of his own delusion and ignorance, and of his literal evasion of scrutiny of all that has gone before--an illegal and bungled war, the alienation of our allies, economic weakness, and moral corruption the likes of which I have never seen. His nomination of Samuel Alito is certainly going to lead to a huge fight in the Senate and the press, and will conveniently shunt the indictment and resignation of VP Dick "I'm a Crook" Cheney's chief of staff I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby on two charges of perjury, two charges of giving false information, and one charge of obstructing justice. No big deal, really, since these crimes carry a maximum sentence of 30 years in a "pound me in the ass" federal penitentiary.

These fools don't even try to be subtle or tricky any longer with these "Hey! Look! Over here!" distraction strategies. And the complicit kneepad mainstream media collectively scuttle over with beaks open waiting for the White House to feed them their talking points. If you want to understand how the press in this country operates, just watch chickens for a few days. I keep a small flock, and while I hate to denigrate these noble birds by using them as an example of Pavlovian behavior, in them it is entirely understandable. We feed them and protect them and they give us eggs.

But the media has a responsibility to protect us, yet they think that their care and feeding comes from the halls of power, which they give such sycophantic obeisance to that you'd think they were on the payroll. In a sense, they are, since the corporate masters of NBC, CBS, CNN, FOX, the New York Times, and so on are connected ball in socket to the very politicos on whom these intrepid reporters are supposed to be keeping honest. When the powerful in the press and the powerful in politics hold banquets together as a normal part of business, when they marry one another (example, NBC's Andrea Mitchell and Fed Chair Alan Greenspan), when they get nice and familiar and their kids play together, there is not going to be what we need to protect the public interest. In any other business in which one agency monitors another, it would be unthinkable for regulators to socialize with those they inspect, but in Washington D.C., it's the only way to fly.

So, in perfect marching cadence, every media outlet this morning was hyping the food fight to come over Alito's nomination to fill Sandra Day O'Connor's Supreme Court seat, and Scooter Libby literally became yesterday's news.

Just chickens running in the barnyard toward the fellow holding the corncobs.

The Wet-Ass Hour

For Rove, Libby, Cheney, Chimpie, et alia, the wet-ass hour is going to be extended indefinitely, which is really a brilliant move on Fitzgerald's part. Keeping the tension and uncertainty mixed into the mess at the White House is the best way to torture those lousy motherfuckers. Rove may be happy he's not indicted today, but remaining under investigation can only mean worse rather than better for him.

The indictment of Scooter may be a demonstration to Rove what will happen to him if he does not flip to save his own pasty, bulbous ass. Fitz must have an airtight case on Libby, and he'd going to show Rove's lawyers that the only way to avoid hard prison time is going to be to turn over a bigger fish. That means Chimpie, Cheney, maybe Rumsfeld, and perhaps quite a number of others.

Remember, the rumor mill has been stoked solely by the lawyers and staffers of those under investigation, not from Fitzgerald's staff, so none of it carries any weight at all. When Fitz has his press conference in a couple of hours, I think there are going to be some very, very shocked motherfuckers.

Stay hopeful and stay tuned.